REFUGEE
"WHEN HE COMES aboard," said Captain Saunders, as he waited for the
landing ramp to extrude itself, "what the devil shall I call him?"
There was a thoughtful silence while the navigation officer and the
assistant pilot considered this problem in etiquette. Then Mitchell
locked the main control panel, and the ship's multitudinous mechanisms
lapsed into unconsciousness as power was withdrawn from them.
"The correct address," he drawled slowly, "is "Your Royal Highness."
"
"Huh!" snorted the captain.
"I'll be damned if I'll call anyone that !"
"In these progressive days," put in Chambers helpfully, "I believe that
"Sir' is quite sufficient.
But there's no need to worry if you forget: it's been a long time since
anyone went to the Tower.
Besides, this Henry isn't as tough a proposition as the one who had all
the wives."
"From all accounts," added Mitchell, "he's a very pleasant young man.
Quite intelligent, too.
He's often been known to ask people technical questions that they
couldn't answer."
Captain Saunders ignored the implications of this remark, beyond
resolving that if Prince Henry wanted to know how a Field Compensation
Drive Generator worked, then Mitchell could do the explaining. He got
gingerly to his feet they'd been operating on half a gravity during
flight, and now they were on Earth, he felt like a ton of bricks and
started to make his way along the corridors that led to the lower air
lock. With an oily purring, the great curving door side-stepped out of
his way. Adjusting his smile, he walked out to meet the television
cameras and the heir to the British throne.
The man who would, presumably, one day be Henry IX of England was still
in his early twenties. He was slightly below average height, and had
fine-drawn, regular features that really lived up to all the
genealogical cliches. Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had
no intention of being impressed by any prince, found himself
unexpectedly moved by the wide, sad eyes.
They were eyes that had seen too many receptions and parades, that had
had to watch countless totally uninteresting things, that had never
been allowed to stray far from the carefully planned official routes.
Looking at that proud but weary face, Captain Saunders glimpsed for the
first time the ultimate loneliness of royalty. All his dislike of that
institution became suddenly trivial against its real defect: what was
wrong with the Crown was the unfairness of inflicting such a burden on
any human being.... The passageways of the Centaurus were too narrow to
allow for general sight-seeing, and it was soon clear that it suited
Prince Henry very well to leave his entourage behind. Once they had
begun moving through the ship, Saunders lost all his stiffness and
reserve, and within a few minutes was treating the prince exactly like
any other visitor. He did not realize that one of the earliest lessons
royalty has to learn is that of putting people at their ease.
"You know, Captain," said the prince wistfully, "this is a big day for
us. I've always hoped that one day it would be possible for spaceships
to operate from England. But it still seems strange to have a port of
our own here, after all these years. me did you ever have much to do
with rockets?"
"Well, I had some training on them, but they were already on the way
out before I graduated. I was lucky: some older men had to go back to
school and start all over again or else abandon space completely if
they couldn't convert to the new ships."
"It made as much difference as that?"
"Oh yes when the rocket went, it was as big as the change from sail to
steam. That's an analogy you'll often hear, by the way. There was a
glamour about the old rockets, just as there was about the old
windjammers, which these modern ships haven't got. When the Centaurus
takes off, she goes up as quietly as a balloon and as slowly, if she
wants to. But a rocket blast-off shook the ground for miles, and you'd
be deaf for days if you were too near the launching apron. Still,
you'll know all that from the old news recordings."
The prince smiled.
"Yes," he said.
"I've often run through them at the Palace. I think I've watched every
incident in all the pioneering expeditions. I was sorry to see the end
of the rockets, too. But we could never have had a spaceport here on
Salisbury plain the vibration would have shaken down Stonehengel"
"Stonehenge?" queried Saunders as he held open a hatch and let the
prince through into Hold Number 3.
"Ancient monument one of the most famous stone circles in the world.
It's really impressive, and about three thousand years old. See it if
you can it's only ten miles from here."
Captain Saunders had some difficulty in suppressing a smile. What an
odd country this was:
where else, he wondered, would you find contrasts like this? It made
him feel very young and raw when he remembered that back home Billy the
Kid was ancient history, and there was hardly anything in the whole of
Texas as much as five hundred years old. For the first time he began
to realize what tradition meant: it gave Prince Henry something that he
could never possess.
Poise, self-confidence, yes, that was it. And a pride that was somehow
free from arrogance because it took itself so much for granted that it
never had to be asserted.
It was surprising how many questions Prince Henry managed to ask in the
thirty minutes that had been allotted for his tour of the freighter.
They were not the routine questions that people asked out of
politeness, quite uninterested in the answers. HRH. Prince Henry knew
a lot about spaceships, and Captain Saunders felt completely exhausted
when he handed his distinguished guest back to the reception committee,
which had been waiting outside the Centaurus with well-simulated
patience.
"Thank you very much, Captain," said the prince as they shook hands in
the air lock.
"I've not enjoyed myself so much for ages. I hope you have a pleasant
stay in England and a successful voyage." Then his retinue whisked him
away, and the port officials, until now, came aboard to check the
ship's papers.
"Well," said Mitchell when it was all over, "what did you think of our
Prince of Wales?"
"He surprised me," answered Saunders frankly.
"I'd never have guessed he was a prince. I always thought they were
rather dumb. But heck, he knew the principles of the Field Drive! Has
he ever been up in space?"
"Once, I think. Just a hop above the atmosphere in a Space Force ship.
It didn't even reach orbit before it came back again but the Prime
Minister nearly had a fit. There were questions in the House and
editorials in the Times. Everyone decided that the heir to the throne
was too valuable to risk in these newfangled inventions. So, though he
has the rank of commodore in the Royal Space Force, he's never even
been to the moon."
"The poor guy," said Captain Saunders.
He had three days to burn, since it was not the captain's job to
supervise the loading of the ship or the preflight maintenance.
Saunders knew skippers who hung around breathing heavily on the necks
of the servicing engineers, but he wasn't that type. Besides, he
wanted to see London. He had been to Mars and Venus and the moon, but
this was his first visit to England. Mitchell and Chambers filled him
with useful information and put him on the monorail to London before
dashing off to see their own families. They would be returning to the
spaceport a day before he did, to see that everything was in order. It
was a great relief having officers one could rely on so implicitly:
they were unimaginative and cautious, but thoroughgoing almost to a
fault. If they said that everything was shipshape, Saunders knew he
could take off without qualms.
The sleek, streamlined cylinder whistled across the carefully tailored
landscape. It was so close to the ground, and traveling so swiftly,
that one could only gather fleeting impressions of the towns and fields
that flashed by. Everything, thought Saunders, was so incredibly
compact, and on such a Lilliputian scale. There were no open spaces,
no fields more than a mile long in any direction. It was enough to
give a Texan claustrophobia particularly a Texan who also happened to
be a space pilot.
The sharply defined edge of London appeared like the bulwark of some
walled city on the horizon. With few exceptions, the buildings were
quite low perhaps fifteen or twenty stories in height. The monorail
shot through a narrow canyon, over a very attractive park, across a
river that was presumably the Thames, and then came to rest with a
steady, powerful surge of deceleration.
A loudspeaker announced, in a modest voice that seemed afraid of being
overheard: "This is Paddington. Passengers for the North please remain
seated." Saunders pulled his baggage down from the rack and headed out
into the station.
As he made for the entrance to the Underground, he passed a bookstall
and glanced at the magazines on display. About half of them, it
seemed, carried photographs of Prince Henry or other members of the
royal family. This, thought Saunders, was altogether too much of a
good thing.
He also noticed that all the evening papers showed the prince entering
or leaving the Centaurus, and bought copies to read in the subway he
begged its pardon, the "Tube."
The editorial comments had a monotonous similarity. At last, they
rejoiced, England need no longer take a back seat among the space-going
nations. Now it was possible to operate a space fleet without having a
million square miles of desert: the silent, gravity-defying ships of
today could land, if need be, in Hyde Park, without even disturbing the
ducks on the Serpentine. Saunders found it odd that this sort of
patriotism had managed to survive into the age of space, but he guessed
that the British had felt it pretty badly when they'd had to borrow
launching sites from the Australians, the Americans, and the
Russians.
The London Underground was still, after a century and a half, the best
transport system in the world, and it deposited Saunders safely at his
destination less than ten minutes after he had left Paddington. In ten
minutes the Centaurus could have covered fifty thousand miles; but
space, after all, was not quite so crowded as this. Nor were the
orbits of space craft so tortuous as the streets Saunders had to
negotiate to reach his hotel. All attempts to straighten out London
had failed dismally, and it was fifteen minutes before he completed the
last hundred yards of his journey.
He stripped off his jacket and collapsed thankfully on his bed. Three
quiet, carefree days all to himself: it seemed too good to be true.
It was. He had barely taken a deep breath when the phone rang.
"Captain Saunders? I'm so glad we found you.
This is the BBC. We have a program called "In Town Tonight' and we
were wondering .. ."
The thud of the air-lock door was the sweetest sound Saunders had heard
for days. Now he was safe; nobody could get at him here in his armored
fortress, which would soon be far out in the freedom of space. It was
not that he had been treated badly: on the contrary, he had been
treated altogether too well. He had made four (or was it five.?)
appearances on various TV programs; he had been to more parties than he
could remember; he had acquired several hundred new friends and (the
way his head felt now) forgotten all his old ones.
"Who started the rumor," he said to Mitchell as they met at the port,
"that the British were reserved and standoffish? Heaven help me if I
ever meet a demonstrative Englishman."
"I take it," replied Mitchell, "that you had a good time."
"Ask me tomorrow," Saunders replied.
"I may have reintegrated my psyche by then."
"I saw you on that quiz program last night," remarked Chambers.
"You looked pretty ghastly."
"Thank you: that's just the sort of sympathetic encouragement I need at
the moment. I'd like to see you think of a synonym for 'jejune' after
you'd been up until three in the morning."
"Vapid," replied Chambers promptly.
"Insipid," said Mitchell, not to be outdone.
"You win. Let's have those overhaul schedules and see what the
engineers have been up to."
Once seated at the control desk, Captain Saunders quickly became his
usual efficient self.
He was home again, and his training took over. He knew exactly what to
do, and would do it with automatic precision. To right and left of
him, Mitchell and Chambers were checking their instruments and calling
the control tower.
It took them an hour to carry out the elaborate preflight routine. When
the last signature had been attached to the last sheet of instructions,
and the last red light on the monitor panel had turned to green,
Saunders flopped back in his seat and lit a cigarette. They had ten
minutes to spare before take-off.
"One day," he said, "I'm going to come to England incogmto to find what
makes the place tick. I don't understand how you can crowd so many
people onto one little island without it sinking."
"Huh," snorted Chambers.
"You should see Holland. That makes England look as wide open as
Texas."
"And then there's this royal family business. Do you know, wherever I
went everybody kept asking me how I got on with Prince Hem~what we'd
talked about didn't I think he was a fine guy, and so on. Franldy, I
got fed up with it. I can't imagine how you've managed to stand it for
a thousand years."
"Don't think that the royal family's been popular all the time,"
replied Mitchell.
"Remember what happened to Charles the First? And some of the things
we said about the early Georges were quite as rude as the remarks your
people made later."
"We just happen to like tradition," said Chambers.
"We're not afraid to change when the time comes, but as far as the
royal family is concerned well, it's unique and we're rather fond of
it. Just the way you feel about the Statue of Liberty."
"Not a fair example. I don't think it's right to put human beings up
on a pedestal and treat them as if they're well, minor deities. Look
at Prince Henry, for instance. Do you think he'll ever have a chance
of doing the things he really wants to do?
I saw him three times on TV when I was in
London. The Srst time he was opening a new school somewhere; then he
was giving a speech to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers at the
Guildhall (I swear I'm not mal ting that up), and finally he was
receiving an address of welcome from the mayor of Podunk, or whatever
your equivalent is." ("Wigan," interjected Mitchell.) "I think I'd
rather be in jail than live that sort of life. Why can't you leave the
poor guy alone?"
For once, neither Mitchell nor Chambers rose to the challenge. Indeed,
they maintained a somewhat frigid silence. That's torn it, thought
Saunders. I should have kept my big mouth shut;
now I've hurt their feelings. I should have remembered that advice I
read somewhere: "The British have two religions cricket and the royal
family. Never attempt to criticise either."
The awkward pause was broken by the radio and the voice of the
spaceport controller.
"Control to Centaurus Your flight lane clear.
O.K. to lift."
"Take-off program starting now!" replied Saunders, throwing the master
switch. Then he leaned back, his eyes taking in the entire control
panel his hands clear of the board but ready for instant action.
He was tense but completely conS dent Better brains than his brains of
metal and crystal and flashing electron streams were in charge of the
Centaurus now. If necessary, he could take command, but he had never
yet lifted a ship manually and never expected to do so. If the
automatics failed, he would cancel the take-off and sit here on Earth
until the fault had been cleared up.
The main field went on, and weight ebbed from the Centaurus. There
were protesting groans from the ship's hull and structure as the
strains redistributed themselves. The curved arms of the landing
cradle were carrying no load now; the slightest breath of wind would
carry the freighter away into the sky.
Control called from the tower: "Your weight now zero: check
calibration."
Saunders looked at his meters. The up-thrust of the field would now
exactly equal the weight of the ship, and the meter readings should
agree with the totals on the loading schedules. In at least one
instance this check had revealed the presence of a stowaway on board a
spaceship the gauges were as sensitive as that.
"One million, five hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and twenty
kilograms," Saunders read off from the thrust indicators.
"Pretty good it checks to within fifteen kilos. The first time I've
been underweight, though. You could have taken on some more candy for
that plump girl friend of yours in Port Lowell, Mitch."
The assistant pilot gave a rather sickly grin. He had never quite
lived down a blind date on Mars which had given him a completely
unwarranted reputation for preferring statuesque blondes.
There was no sense of motion, but the Centaurus was now falling up into
the summer sky as her weight was not only neutralized but reversed. To
the watchers below, she would be a swiftly mounting star, a silver
globule climbing through and beyond the clouds. Around her, the blue
of the atmosphere was deepening into the eternal darkness of space.
Like a bead moving along an invisible wire, the freighter was following
the pattern of radio waves that would lead her from world to world.
This, thought Captain Saunders, was his twenty-sixth take-off from
Earth. But the wonder would never die, nor would he ever outgrow the
feeling of power it gave him to sit here at the control panel, the
master of forces beyond even the dreams of mankind's ancient gods. No
two departures were ever the same; some were into the dawn, some toward
the sunset, some above a cloud-veiled Earth, some through clear and
sparkling skies. Space itself might be unchanging, but on Earth the
same pattern never recurred, and no man ever looked twice at the same
landscape or the same sky. Down there the Atlantic waves were marching
eternally toward Europe, and high above them but so far below the
Centaurus~ the glittering bands of cloud were advancing before the same
winds. England began to merge into the continent, and the European
coast line became foreshortened and misty as it sank hull down beyond
the curve of the world. At the frontier of the west, a fugitive stain
on the horizon was the first hint of America. With a single glance,
Captain Saunders could span all the leagues across which Columbus had
labored half a thousand years ago.
With the silence of limitless power, the ship shook itself free from
the last bonds of Earth. To an outside observer, the only sign of the
energies it was expending would have been the dull red glow from the
radiation fins around the vessel's equator, as the heat loss from the
mass-converters was dissipated into space.
"14:03:45," wrote Captain Saunders neatly in the log.
"Escape velocity attained. Course deviation negligible."
There was little point in making the entry. The modest 25,000 miles an
hour that had been the almost unattainable goal of the first astronauts
had no practical significance now, since the Centaurus was still
accelerating and would continue to gain speed for hours. But it had a
profound psychological meaning. Until this moment, if power had
failed, they would have fallen back to Earth. But now gravity could
never recapture them: they had achieved the freedom of space, and could
take their pick of the planets. In practice, of course, there would be
several kinds of hell to pay if they did not pick Mars and deliver
their cargo according to plan. But Captain Saunders, like all
spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this
he would sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the somber
Neptunian wastes, lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.
An hour after take-off, according to the hallowed ritual, Chambers left
the course computer to its own devices and produced the three glasses
that lived beneath the chart table. As he drank the traditional toast
to Newton, Oberth, and Einstein, Saunders wondered how this little
ceremony had originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for
at least sixty years:
perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engineer who
made the remark, "I've burned more alcohol in sixty seconds than you've
ever sold across this lousy bar."
Two hours later, the last course correction that the tracking stations
on Earth could give them had been fed into the computer. From now on,
until Mars came sweeping up ahead they were on their own. It was a
lonely thought, yet a curiously exhilarating one. Saunders savored it
in his mind.
There were just the three of them here and no one else within a million
miles.
In the circumstances, the detonation of an atomic bomb could hardly
have been more shattering than the modest knock on the cabin door....
Captain Saunders had never been so startled in his life. With a yelp
that had already left him before he had a chance to suppress it, he
shot out of his seat and rose a full yard before the ship's residual
gravity field dragged him back. Chambers and Mitchell, on the other
hand, behaved with traditional British phlegm. They swiveledin their
bucket seats, stared at the door, and then waited for their captain to
take action.
It took Saunders several seconds to recover. Had he been confronted
with what might be called a normal emergency, he would already have
been halfway into a space suit. But a diffident knock on the door of
the control cabin, when everybody else in the ship was sitting beside
him, was not a fair test.
A stowaway was simply impossible. The danger had been so obvious,
right from the beginning of commercial space flight, that the most
stringent precautions had been taken against it. One of his officers,
Saunders knew, would always have been on duty during loading; no one
could possibly have crept in unobserved. Then there had been the
detailed preflight inspection, carried out by both Mitchell and
Chambers. Finally, there was the weight check at the moment before
take-off; that was conclusive. No, a stowaway was totally .. .
The knock on the door sounded again. Captain Saunders clenched his
fists and squared his jaw. In a few minutes, he thought, some romantic
idiot was going to be very, very sorry.
"Open the door, Mr. Mitchell," Saunders growled. In a single long
stride, the assistant pilot crossed the cabin and jerked open the
hatch.
For an age, it seemed, no one spoke. Then the stowaway, wavering
slightly in the low gravity, came into the cabin. He was completely
self-possessed, and looked very pleased with himself.
"Good afternoon, Captain Saunders," he said, "I must apologise for this
sudden intrusion."
Saunders swallowed hard. Then, as the pieces of the jigsaw fell into
place, he looked first at Mitchell, then at Chambers. Both of his
officers stared guilelessly back at him with expressions of ineffable
innocence.
"So that's it," he said bitterly.
There was no need for any explanations: everything was perfectly clear.
It was easy to picture the complicated negotiations, the midnight
meetings, the falsification of records, the off-loading of nonessential
cargoes that his trusted colleagues had been conducting behind his
back. He was sure it was a most interesting story, but he didn't want
to hear about it now. He was too busy wondering what the Manual of
Space Law would have to say about a situation like this, though he was
already gloomily certain that it would be of no use to him at all.
It was too late to turn back, of course: the conspirators wouldn't have
made an elementary miscalculation like that. He would just have to
make the best of what looked to be the trickiest voyage in his
career.
He was still trying to think of something to say when the PRIORlIY
signal started flashing on the radio board. The stowaway looked at his
watch.
"I was expecting that," he said.
"It's probably the Prime Minister. I think I'd better speak to the
poor man."
Saunders thought so too.
"Very well, Your Royal Highness," he said sulkily, and with such
emphasis that the title sounded almost like an insult. Then, feeling
much put upon, he retired into a corner.
It was the Prime Minister all right, and he sounded very upset. Several
times he used the phrase "your duty to your people" and once there was
a distinct catch in his throat as he said something about "devotion of
your subjects to the Crown." Saunders realised, with some surprise,
that he really meant it.
While this emotional harangue was in progress, Mitchell leaned over to
Saunders and whispered in his ear:
"The old boy's in a sticky wicket, and he knows it. The people will be
behind the prince when they hear what's happened. Everybody knows he's
been trying to get into space for years."
"I wish he hadn't chosen my ship," said Saunders.
"And I'm not sure that this doesn't count as mutiny."
"The heck it does. Mark my words when this is all over you'll be the
only Texan to have the Order of the Garter. Won't that be nice for
you?"
"Shush!" said Chambers. The prince was speaking, his words winging
back across the abyss that now sundered him from the island he would
one day rule.
"I am sorry, Mr. Prime Minister," he said, "if I've caused you any
alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient. Someone has to do
everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come for a
member of my family to leave Earth. It will be a valuable part of my
education, and will make me more fitted to carry out my duty.
Good-by."
He dropped the microphone and walked over to the observation window the
only spaceward-looking port on the entire ship.
Saunders watched him standing there, proud and lonely but contented
now. And as he saw the prince staring out at the stars which he had at
last attained, all his annoyance and indignation slowly evaporated.
No one spoke for a long time. Then Prince Henry tore his gaze away
from the blinding splendor beyond the port, looked at Captain Saunders,
and smiled.
"Where's the galley, Captain?" he asked.
"I may be out of practice, but when I used to go scouting I was the
best cook in my patrol."
Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled back. The tension seemed to lift
from the control room. Mars was still a long way off, but he knew now
that this wasn't going to be such a bad trip after all....